Chapter Text
He’d missed, he’d actually fucking missed. He had been so sure of everything that he was doing. Neil Perry had put that gun to his temple with the full intention of pulling the trigger. He wouldn’t live a lie. If he was going to die, it would be on his own terms, not sixty years later after living out his father’s dreams.
Just as he had set his finger behind the trigger, as he was feeling the cold metal on his skin, he heard a voice. He heard Todd’s voice, no words, just a light laugh. The laugh he had heard when they talked late at night. The same laugh that Todd used while he helped Neil practice lines for the play. He always said that the people talked funny in Shakespeare plays.
His hand had trembled, just enough to change the trajectory of the bullet. Just enough to keep him alive. Barely, he was holding on by a thread.
If you could even call his state living.
After a seven hour surgery, he’d become comatose. His whole head was wrapped in white bandages, the blood soaking through them just added to the swelling on his face. He didn’t quite look like himself. Although deep in a coma, his father’s voice echoed loud enough to shake the hospital floor. The doctors avoided him as much as they could, he was just cold and questioning of their capabilities.
“I want that Keating fired. I want him to never teach again!” Mr. Perry’s voice boomed like a crack of thunder.
“Darling please, just calm down.” Neil‘s mother sat beside him, her voice was laced with an overwhelming sadness.
“He radicalized our son! Gave him unrealistic goals and pushed him to the edge! He should get his license revoked, before any other fine young men get hurt.” Even after his own son’s suicide attempt, it wouldn’t have Neil that his father was still finding a scapegoat.
Neil’s coma was like a haze, a dark, deep haze of sounds that felt too far but also too close: his mother’s whimpers, his father’s pacing, the busy hallway. He could feel it too, luckily a large dose of morphine was keeping the pain at bay, but he could still feel some of it. He could feel the tightness of the bandages, the cotton blanket under his fingers, the tube down his throat that wasn’t painful, just slightly uncomfortable. It was like his eyes had both been sanded shut, it felt like they were open, but they weren’t. He wanted to wake up and defend Mr. Keating from his father’s harsh words, but he couldn’t. It was like a bad dream where the thing he wanted was right in front of him but he couldn’t touch it. It felt like the whole weight of the world was on his chest, pushing him down farther and farther.
He felt his mother’s soft hand fall on top of his own, he wanted to grab it, but he couldn’t.
“Oh darling, you’ll be alright.” She said. She’d always been an optimist, yet she’d never stood up to his pessimistic father. Not once had she stepped up for her son. At this point, he was used to it.
“Damn right.” Neil couldn’t see it, but his father was gripping the footboard of the bed until his knuckles had turned white. “He’ll be good as new without Keating or Welton or those so called friends of his. He’ll be a fine man and a fine doctor.”
Most of the words he heard sounded like they were coming from above water and he was ten feet under, but these ones were clear. Even after putting a gun to his head, he couldn’t be his own person. No matter what he did he’d always be his father’s marionette. He didn’t want to leave Welton or Keating or his friends. It wasn’t fair. He couldn’t live like that.
The room erupted into chaos as Neil’s whole body began to convulse. He was thrashing about, his head jerking from side to side. Doctors surrounded him as nurses pulled his parents away. They tried to hold him down, one taking his heart rate as another injected him with a high dose sedative. Inside, Neil was suffocating.
-
“Has anyone heard from Neil?” Knox asked, it had been nearly two full days since the play, and he hadn’t been seen or heard from.
The group was studying in one of the common rooms. They had less than 24 hours until a Latin final. Meeks was attempting to teach them, but it wasn’t working. Even before Knox brought Neil up, things had been odd.
“Nothing.” Meeks said.
“That son of a bitch probably did something to him.” Charlie said, “I never liked his dad.”
“Neil is fine, probably just blowing off some steam before coming back.” Cameron said.
“Ten bucks says the belt burns on his ass will last for weeks.” Charlie whispered to himself, but it was just loud enough for Todd to hear.
Todd couldn’t just sit there and listen to them, it didn’t feel right. None of this felt right. Something was off, something big. He closed his textbook and began to stand up. The past few days had been a nauseating mess of emotion.
“Hey where are you going?” Charlie asked.
“I uh, I feel a bit lightheaded. I’m gonna take a nap before dinner.” Todd said.
He practically booked it back to the dorm room. He needed Neil to be there, he needed him to be sitting on his bed and wait for him. He needed him to make a stupid joke or ask to borrow a sweater.
He sat down on the edge of his bed and tried to focus on breathing. Whenever he got really wigged out Neil would sit on the floor right in front of Todd’s bed and breathe with him. He looked over at the door, Neil’s regular pair of converse was missing. Pretty much everything else Neil owned was there, but Todd needed the shoes to be there.
“Fuck.” He whispered to himself, his heart was beating a million miles a minute.
He half expected to see Neil walk through that door any minute. Maybe with a black eye or a somber look on his face. But Todd would’ve held him tight and let him cry into his arms. He just wanted to feel Neil again, the soft brush of hands or the passing of a pencil was something that had become so personal so fast.
He shouldn’t have done what he did. Getting emotionally invested into Neil was such a bad idea. He should’ve just kept his head down, finished high school, then college, gotten married, had a few kids, and forgotten all about Neil. But how could he forget that face, that boy? It’s hard to forget about someone when they’re in front of you all the time.
Sometimes, late at night, Todd wished he had a different roommate, a different set of friends, a different English teacher. He wanted to stop questioning things and hoping because he knew that it would disappoint him. He wished that his eyes hadn’t been opened. He slumped onto his back and rubbed his eyes. Why did his parents transfer him here? He could’ve just stayed at his old school and did just fine. He could’ve done without hearing about Thoreau or Whitman. He could’ve graduated without fantasizing about his roommate and running off to the woods with him. Life could’ve been so much easier.
There was a soft knock at the door, and he groaned.
“It’s open.” Todd said.
The door creaked open and Charlie walked in, both of his hands on his hips.
“What do you want?”
“Mr.Keating wants to see us.” Charlie said.
“Can’t this wait? I’m trying to sleep.” Todd replied.
“It’s about Neil.” Charlie said. Todd practically shot out of bed.
“Is he here?”
“I don’t know, he just wants to see us in his classroom.”
-
Keating paced his classroom, he didn’t know how to say it. When he got the news he had cried for an hour straight, bawling at his desk. Now he stood in front of five impressionable teenagers and he didn’t know how to tell them.
“Neil was wonderful the other night, wasn’t he?” Keating said.
The boys just sat at the desks in front of him, silent. They could all sense that something was wrong, but they didn’t know how to ask.
Keating looked down at the floor and back up at his students, his eyes were beginning to water and he was starting to shake.
“After the play, Neil went home. He- he took his father’s gun, and he-“ the words got caught in his throat, “he shot himself.”
Todd could feel his stomach on the ground. The remainder of his lunch threatened to come up. This couldn’t be happening, no, this couldn’t be.
“Is he-“
“He’s in the hospital.” Mr.Keating said. “He hasn’t woken up yet.”
“He’s comatose?” Pitts asked.
Keating just nodded.
“Can we see him?” Meeks asked.
“At the request of Neil’s father, none of us are permitted at the hospital.” Mr.Keating said.
“That’s bullshit!” Charlie laughed, he didn’t find it funny, just outrageous. “We’re his best friends and we can’t see him?”
“His parents have the last say, there’s nothing we can do, sons.” Mr.Keating said, “I’ve also called you here to inform you that an internal investigation into my class will be conducted. I expect that you’ll all be questioned.”
“An internal investigation?” Meeks asked.
Their teacher just nodded.
“Wait, does this mean that you could be fired?” Knox asked.
“Afraid so.”
-
Things were getting worse for Neil, his convulsions, or seizures as the doctors had called them, were becoming more frequent. The doctors kept talking about how the seizures were preventing him from healing and were making everything worse.
As time went on, Neil heard voices less and less. And when he did, it sounded like he was farther and farther underwater. First ten feet, then twenty, then thirty. Time was almost nonexistent, and he seemed to sleep more often. The edge of the cliff he walked on became more and more appealing as time went on. He could fall off and this would all be over, he’d never go to military school or Harvard or marry some stuffy woman. It seemed like just the right choice.
But then he thought of Todd, and Charlie and Keating and all of the other dead poets. Leaving them almost felt worse. He’d leave them crying and wondering what might have happened. It didn’t seem right to give up.
On the third night, after his eighth seizure of the day, the mood changed.
“Mr. and Mrs.Perry, your son isn’t getting better, and we’re worried that with the amount of brain damage he’s sustained, he won’t be the same.” The doctor looked down at Neil. “We can’t be sure what will happen, but it’s time to think about possibly ending his suffering.”
His mother cried, she wept tears in the corner and held her son’s hand, pleading with him to wake up.
“No.” His father said, “He’ll be fine, he just needs time.”
“Sir, it’s-“
“No!” His father’s voice boomed, Neil could feel his mother jump. “He just needs more time.”
It took her a moment, but his mother finally spoke up.
“Maybe if we let his friends come then-“
“I don’t want those kids anywhere near my son. All they do is corrupt him.”
Neil felt his chest drop again, he wished he succeeded, without his friends, he couldn’t think of any reason to live. They were his lifeline, his happiness, his spirit. His Father had taken away his acting and his school and Mr.Keating. His friends were all he had left. Without them, he wouldn’t be himself. Just a shell of a man saying “yes sir” and “no sir.’ Keating told him that poetry, beauty, romance, and love were the reason to live. Right now it seemed like none of those things had existed.
Another seizure began.
-
Both Charlie and Todd had failed the Latin test. How could they focus when Neil was in a coma? No teacher had spoken a word about Neil, there was no assembly or anything. Kids had started their own rumors too. I heard his dad kicked the shit out of him. I heard that his parents sent him away to get fixed, only queers do theatre.
With every new rumor and lie, Todd felt angrier and angrier. He wanted to yell at them to shut up and to leave Neil alone. It wasn’t any of their business anyway, they’d never even spoken to him. They only cared because Neil’s situation was entertaining, like some sort of sick game. Todd had always carried a sort of pent up anger he didn’t know how to explain.
“I can’t do this anymore.” Todd said one night, they were in his dorm room, Charlie was sitting on Neil’s desk chair, neither of them would touch his bed, they didn’t feel like it was theirs to touch.
“How can they bar us from seeing him? Does Mr.Perry not realize that his son has people that care about him?” They were trying to do their Chemistry homework, but it was too hard to focus.
“It feels like I’m dying inside.” Todd absentmindedly said.
The room was quiet for one moment more.
“What if we went to see him without them knowing?” Charlie suggested.
“How on earth would we do that? It’s not like we could leave school during visiting hours.” Todd rubbed his eyes, all of this was making him tired. He’d been tired for days.
“Well,” Charlie paused to think, “we could say that we just got into town.”
“Huh?”
“We’re family from out of town and we just got in. It’s be so sad if something happened in the middle of the night and we never got to see Neil again.”
“I don’t know.” Todd looked down at the ground, he wasn’t even sure that he wanted to see Neil, he’d seen pictures of people in comas, he couldn’t imagine that happening to someone that he knew.
“Listen, I get it, it’s different then when we sneak out for meetings. If things go south, I promise to take the blame, all of it.” Charlie promised.
Todd sat and thought about it. What if that was the last time that he saw him? What if Neil died? Or his father sent him away? He couldn’t let him go without a goodbye, even if only one person could say it. The idea that the last glimpse of Neil he’d ever get would be him going away in his father’s car made him feel sick.
“I’m in, what’s the plan?”